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DECO - Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory

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What is DECO?
DECO is a system to monitor the flux of cosmic-rays over a large area using the camera chips in cellphones as the sensor element. While each chip has a small surface area with which to detect possible events, a large number of phones scattered over a county or state can provide for a much larger virtual detector.
This is accomplished by running the DECO application on a number of Android phones and passing along potential event data to a central serve for future analysis.

Project wiki

What are cosmic-rays?

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History

Extensive air showers

Initial testing data

Preliminary results from August 2012:


Further results from August 2013:

Image analysis script for DECO:

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This finds all the images in the current directory and writes the following statistical values to a csv file:

1. Image size, Image width, Image height,
2. Max subpixel value,
3. Position of max subpixel
4. Minimum subpixel value and position of that subpixel
5. Average value of pixels
6. Relative variation in pixels
7. Standard deviation of pixels

import pylab
import numpy
import os
import glob
import csv
#gets current path
path = os.getcwd()
#opens csv file and write a header
c = csv.writer(open("DECOImageAnalysis.csv", "wb"))
c.writerow(["Image size","Image width","Image height","Max image value","Position of max image value","Min image value","Position of min image value","Average value","Relative variation","Standard deviation"])
 
#The for loop finds all the files ending in .jpg and writes statistical values of that image on the csv
for infile in glob.glob( os.path.join(path,'*.jpg') ):
    print "current file is: " + infile
    img=pylab.imread(infile)
    relVar = img.mean()/img.std()
    c.writerow(["%6d"%(img.size),"%3d"%img.shape[0],"%3d"%img.shape[1],"%1.2f"%img.max(),"%6d"%img.argmax(),"%1.2f"%img.min(),"%6d"%img.argmin(),"%1.5f"%img.mean(),"%1.5f"%relVar,"%1.5f"%img.std()])

download:

Example Images

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Track.jpg Image with cosmic-ray track.
TrackEnhanced.png Same image, but magnified and with the color range compressed.

NoTrack.jpg Image with noise due to heating from the phone.
NoTrackEnhanced.jpg Same image, but with the color range compressed.

Source Code and Android Install files

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